Dark Stain (17 page)

“The Fuehrer,” Baumgartner said, “he is for the
Herrenvolk
princip. One
Herrenvolk
for Europe and one
Herrenvolk
for America.”

“Each with their jackal peoples,” Darton amended. “Hitler’s got his Italians and Rumanians and Finns. We’ve got the Gold Shirts in Mexico, others.” He started another bottle. “The main thing to remember is that the enemy is always the idea of the herd, whether it’s a bolshevik herd or a democratic herd.”

“Not fight each other like now,” Baumgartner said sadly, chewing on a turkey sandwich. “I have many in my family lost on the other side.”

“We’ve made too many mistakes in the organization,” Darton said, banging on the table with an empty bottle. “What’s in that suitcase? Valerian. You should be picking up hand grenades, Bill. Our mistakes are nauseating. In ‘36, weren’t we ready to seize the Government?”

“Who, you and the Reds?” Bill said. He had decided to stay on; he guessed that Baumgartner was also in the organization or Darton wouldn’t have been talking so freely.

“No, you bastard. We were ready. We had munitions shelters ready all over the country but then the Haydens — Hayden wasn’t in the organization then, thank God — got cold feet. They were bankers. Cold feet, cold heart, cold peckers!” Darton ranted. “Can you imagine Hayden sleeping with a woman, any woman? You can’t. He’s got a dollar sign where his pecker ought to hang. ‘36, the crucial year. But the bankers won. The bankers were afraid. There had been some leaks. The crazy Quaker Smedley Butler wasn’t our man, never had been our man. He was for the herd, always had been. And the leaks, the exposes in the Red press, the liberal press! The bankers began to fidget about the popular pulse. Popular pulse, God! Everything was ready. The majority of people would’ve followed like cattle. Didn’t Hitler demonstrate in the Reichstag Fire that all that was needed at the right time was daring? But since when have bankers been daring?”

“I built three munitions shelters in Chicago that year,” Baumgartner said.

“We had secret radio code books,” Darton said. “Dynamite, not valerian planted in the walls of key buildings in New York and Chicago. In Washington, D.C., too!” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that we could’ve blown out the walls and our munitions shelters would’ve commanded all the Government buildings. Bankers, bankers! All during ‘35 I’d been organizing cells. Six men with rifles, hand grenades, pistols, one submachine gun — that was a cell. That was something! Fifty men were a unit, two hundred men a battalion.”

“And our people reading Goebbels’ book from the other side,” Baumgartner said.

“Goebbels’ book?” Bill asked.

Darton explained. “It was a manual on street fighting. It was called ‘Communist Party Instructions For Guerilla Fighting’ in case any copies got lost.” His eyes had reddened from the beer and the smoking, his head jerking from side to side on his neck, the blue cigarette clouds billowing on all sides of him, so that Bill, staring at Darton felt as if he were listening, not to some ordinary operative, but to someone full of smoke and fury. Darton sat his chair as if on a horse. “Now we are making stinkeroos. Bankers’ bombs. Bankers’ careful strategy. Penny by penny and compound interest if you live long enough.” He stared up at the ceiling. He had lost interest in the discussion. Bill drank another beer and another beer. They emptied the bottles and Baumgartner went out for more; they emptied those bottles, too, and gradually Bill’s tongue loosened. He told Darton about Big Boy Bose and Aden. Darton listened as Bill shouted that the niggers were the lowest of the low, and that he believed that it was always a mistake to use niggers in any job. And after awhile Darton hinted that if somebody were to write a letter, attacking Aden and Big Boy and send it to the respectable nigger organizations that would eliminate those niggers. Darton rambled on about what he knew of Big Boy, and of Aden. Aden’s wife was a whore and Aden himself was on a salary basis for the A.R.A. Yes, Darton declared, banging the table, the organization needed a purge and there’d be a purge too some day. Beerily, Bill listened to Darton thundering on the subject of purges. The idea of a letter, Bill reflected as the room became dense with cigarette smoke; that wasn’t such a bad idea; Hayden’d made him a nigger phoning the kike; and why not be a nigger writing a letter about Aden; who’d ever find out; and besides it wouldn’t be selling out the organization; Aden was a nigger bastard, wasn’t he, and putting the nigger bastards in their place was important, wasn’t it.

Bill felt as good as he had early in the morning before his fight with Isabelle. Put all the niggers in their place, he thought, belching; Hayden was no real white man working with niggers the way he was; Darton was right even if he was a Red bastard; the nigger men, slaves, the nigger women, whores, if they had any looks; slaves and whores and that was where Aden belonged; Christ, he’d never do anything against the organization, never, not in a thousand years; not if they threw him in jail; silent as a grave, that’d be him; silent as the grave.

“S
AM
— Sam — ”

He heard voice, voice without a name, voice calling to him, hallooing through a dense greyness, and he stirred in his bed, in the greyness in which he was submerged and the voice was sharper:

“Sam, wake up — ”

He propelled himself out of the greyness in a waking current that moved faster and faster and the greyness swirled out of his eyes in great unwindings. He blinked through slitted eyes and recognized not Suzy but his mother. In a blue and white checkered house apron, she was standing in the doorway of his room. Her faded greying hair hung disheveled and her big-chinned face was smiling.

“Sleepyhead,” she said. “The telephone like yesterday. They got nerve. Not eight o’clock but such people don’t sleep.”

“Who is it?” he asked, digging his bare feet into the red morocco leather slippers at the side of his bed. “The Harlem Equality League again?” He hadn’t told his mother yesterday that the early call wasn’t the Harlem Equality League.

“Worse yet.”

“Who is it, mom?”

She wrung her hands, her eyelids crinkling as if she had tasted lemon. “The Communists. Not eight o’clock so they butt in. I tell them you don’t want to be bothered but fresh like they are, they say they keep ringing until they speak to you.”

He strode past his mother into the foyer and over to the telephone. He put the receiver to his ear. “Hello, this is Miller,” he said.

A voice answered. “You God damn white bastard, you kike! Get out of Harlem you aimen to live. All you white bastards get out of Harlem!”

“Who’s this?” Sam cried. There was no answer. It was yesterday morning all over again.

“Sam, so fast? What do they want?”

“Nothing much,” he said.

“Not eight o’clock and so fast they talk,” she said condemningly. “Advice, they give you?”

“No.”

“Don’t even let you talk even.”

“Mom, get me some breakfast. I’m getting washed.”

“How do you want your eggs?”

“Any style.”

“Scramble or whole yellows?”

“Whole yellows.” He waited until she walked away into the kitchen. He heard the Frigidaire door slam and then the sputter of butter frying in a pan. He got to his feet and his legs were unsteady. He glanced at the telephone. Who could’ve called him? Who? He tried to recall the voice but already it was echoing out of memory. It had been hard enough hearing it. He shut his eyes, concentrated. “You God damn white bastard … Kike … Get out of Harlem … Aimen to live …
White
!
Kike
!” Of all the muffled words only these two now rang in his brain. He shuffled towards the bathroom, his shoulders stooped. In the bathroom mirror, he stared at his face. Like always it was. Who said his face was like always? He noticed that the color had ebbed out of his lips. He was very white, his head bent. He raised his head on a neck turned into rubber. Let it come, he thought; the dirty rats; Harlem Equality League were they; Communists were they; the dirty rats.

His mother knocked on the door. “Sam, the breakfast’s ready.”

“I haven’t shaved yet.”

“So shave later. The eggs ready, nice and brown like you like them.”

“All right, I’ll be out. No, mom. Put a lid over them. I may as well shave since I’m here.”

“All right for you, Sam. For Suzy you shave? Your
shicksa
won’t make you such eggs. Only your mother,” she mumbled jealously. “Why don’t you come home a lil later from your
shicksa
? A million
finer yiddischer maidels
but my Sam a
shicksa
brings home to the house.”

“Mom, don’t bother me.”

“All right, I won’t bother you. Never you mind, I won’t bother you, but some day you’ll be sorry. I won’t bother you always.”

He heard her leaving the bathroom door and she was unreal to him. This phone call, he frowned; this second phone call. He assembled his shaving set and shaved with furious strokes as if the razor were a bayonet with which he was charging the unknown blackmailer whose voice he had heard two mornings in a row. He cut his chin, used the styptic pencil. He stared at the reddened point and suddenly he groaned.

He trudged back into his bedroom and sat down on the bed. He could hear his heart pumping and he wondered if this was what fear was. To stare blankly at a wall. To feel as if in a great net that was slowly but surely closing in all around him. The wall, the room, the whole city, the whole world were in the net. His mind saw blood and the blood was his own. They were sweeping him out of life and future and love. They had trapped him in their mesh of leaflets and phone calls.

“Sam, come eat your breakfast,” his mother said. “Your eggs’ll be nothing worth it. Eggs must be treated respectful, Sam. They don’t come for nothing. Everybody’s eaten except you.”

“Have they all gone?”

“Don’t you live here since you come home with the cows? Papa’s in the store, Rose is in Macy’s, Mikey’s in school. Your
shicksa
makes you forget your own family.”

“In a minute, mom.” But he couldn’t move a muscle. It was only Wednesday, he was thinking; only Wednesday. He remembered what Johnny had said Monday night about slapping the face of a mean guy, and all his lifetime from his earliest boyhood onwards rose before him, conjured by Johnny’s remark, and shockingly different as if he had never before understood his own past. All his life (but he hadn’t known it until now), that mean guy had also shadowed him and called him kike, using the innocent child mouths of the kids he’d gone to public school with, using the eyes of forgotten Christians, using the questionnaires of the employment agencies. Always he had been hemmed in by the mean guy’s hundred hands, all his life circled, all the horizons blackened by the cyclones of hate. That had been his life as it truly was but his eyes had been closed until now; all he’d seen and felt were the blinding joys, kissing his first girl, smashing through a line of green jerseys with a football under one arm, reading the great books for the first great time. He had been blinded by school and college, by family, by young love, by the jobs that had finally brought him into a blue uniform. But was it all a blindness, was the joy of growing and becoming and loving and being on the earth a blindness? No, no. It was good to live, to be in love with Suzy, to hold to sweet life with all one’s might of heart and brain and flesh. This was true. The rest was false.

He stared down at his white ankles with their fine blue veins and hate glowed in him. What was he moping for, what was he scared for? What did his life or any man’s life amount to in a world of a million lost lives, a million slaughters, a million rapes. All that mattered was to fight them, the cursed fascists, to fight them to
their
death. He felt the fire of hate in his vitals. His cheeks pinked, his eyes sharpened and the hand that he pushed through his thick brown hair was a living hand.

He dressed quickly, hurried out of his room into the kitchen. “Hello, mom, how about those eggs?”

“Sam, the
shicksa
makes you happy?” Sighingly, his mother slid the eggs out of the frying pan into a plate which she set down before him on the table.

“Her name’s Suzy. Better call her Suzy, not
shicksa
.”

“Why better?”

“I’m going to marry her like I told you yesterday morning.”

“Marry who you want but not a
shicksa
, God forbid.”

“God’s got nothing to do with it.” He drained the glass of orange juice and pitched into the eggs.

“Sam, don’t fool your mother.”

“I’m not fooling. One of these days I’ll bring Suzy here and say, ‘Meet my wife’.”

“Fool, I am! Rose’s been telling me you mean serious but I don’t believe her.” She clasped her hands over her stomach. “You think the
shicksa’s
mother, she will like it?”

“What counts is that Suzy and I will like it.”

“
Shicksas
and Communists early in the morning,” she complained. “Sam, me, I don’t care so much. If she’s a fine girl, I don’t care so much. I’m not altogether a foolish old woman. Better a fine
shicksa
than a not so fine Jewish girl. But Sam your father’ll have a stroke. His blood pressure’s too high, he’ll have a stroke. Your father’ll drop dead. When he asks about you, I don’t tell him. Sam, for you I want the best. All my life I want the best for you. If we would’ve had money, you would be a doctor with a nice practise and not this trouble in Harlem. But it wasn’t to be. I’m not a fanatic, my golden son, like some Jews, like your own father. Hitler has
ausge-fanaticked
me.”

The doorbell rang and his head jerked towards the kitchen door. “Who’s that? Who can it be?”

“The landlord for the rent, let him bust! He’s promised to paint the kitchen and the bathroom but he can’t get the paint.

To listen to him, his paint’s on all the warships, the liar! Such promises he can give to Hitler, let him burn for all the people he make suffer.”

Sam stood up. His .38 was in the dresser drawer in his bedroom. He wondered if he ought to get it.

His mother went to the door. “Who do you want?” Sam heard her saying.

“Sam home? My name’s Cashman. I’m a friend of his.”

Sam’s nerves unwound at Butch Cashman’s voice. He walked out into the corridor. “What do you want, Cashman?”

Cashman had taken off his hat and now he stepped forward in front of Mrs. Miller. Under one arm, he was carrying a mass of newspapers. “All I want’s a minute, Sam.”

Sam shoved his hands into his pockets. Behind Cashman, his mother shook her head warningly at him. Almost, Sam laughed. It was funny, his mother associating Cashman with the “Communist” phone call.

“Sam,” his mother said meaningfully. “Go finish your breakfast. Visitors can come some other time when you’re not busy.”

“I’m finished, mom.”

“But your coffee. Coffee’s hard to get. Have your coffee. He can come some other time.” And she scowled at the back of Cashman’s head like a mother cat glaring at a hand poking among her kittens.

“Come in,” Sam said. “Maybe you’ll have some coffee.”

“Thanks,” Cashman boomed. “Coffee! I’ll come here every morning.”

They went into the kitchen. Mrs. Miller took Cashman’s hat and he sat down opposite Sam at the table, dropping his newspapers on the floor. He was wearing a grey sport jacket and a blue sport shirt; his pearl shirt buttons gleamed in the light of the kitchen window and his carefully brushed hair shone. Mrs. Miller poured a second cup of coffee and placed it in front of Cashman. “Thanks, Ma,” he beamed at her. “I’ll do the same for you some day.”

She just looked at him, gaping. He stirred his coffee. “Sam, where do I get the nerve to bust in here? Can I speak right out in front of Ma?”

“Why not?”

“Ma,” Mrs. Miller muttered to herself at the gas range. “Mister,” she said very politely. “Excuse me but what is this ma business?”

“When they’re single I call them Sis. Get what I mean? When they’re mothers I call them Ma.”

“So,” Mrs. Miller snorted. “You do this to every woman you see?”

“He does,” Sam said.

“But you get slapped, excuse the expression, for being fresh?” Mrs. Miller pursued.

“Never.”

“Mmm.” She stated at him, silenced.

“Sam,” Cashman said, “Johnny’s been too soft with you. This great personal friendship’s got to get realistic.”

“Where do you get off — ”

“Hold it, pal.” He picked up the batch of newspapers. “Take the chip off your shoulder, Sam. Keep it for the other side, not for me. Look. Read about it yourself. See where I get off! They busted up the synagogue on One Hundred Fifteenth Street last night. The Beth-Sholem synagogue.”

“You say a synagogue?” Mrs. Miller asked.

Cashman looked at her. “It’s a shame,” he said quietly. “What’s the use beating around the bush! They busted in and used the synagogue for a toilet. Ripped the Torahs to pieces.”

“The Torahs!” Mrs. Miller exclaimed. “God forbid.” Sam stared at his mother, heart pounding. He knew how hurt she must be; the Torahs, the holy Testaments, donated by the wealthy and the pious, took months to make; each Hebrew letter had to be copied by hand; a mutilated Torah was like a mutilated child to all the orthodox; like a child the mutilated Torah would be buried with tears.

“When did it happen?” Sam asked as quietly as Cashman had spoken.

“Last night.”

Sam took one of the newspapers and skimmed through the story. “The police are going to investigate,” he said. “I hope it isn’t a routine investigation.”

“God,” Mrs. Miller moaned. “How can people be like that.” She dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her apron and hurried out of the kitchen.

“Sam,” Cashman continued grimly. “Johnny asked you to talk at our union meeting tomorrow night. You nixed him. How about changing your mind?”

“I’ve got to think it over.”

“What’s there to think over? Our side got to get moving.”

“Who says I’m your side?”

Cashman smacked his lips over the coffee. His tawny colored eyes narrowed and he glanced at Sam as if he would have liked to throw a fist at him. “What’s the use even answering that one. I got the morning off where I work to work with you.”

“I don’t need you.”

“You need me, Tarzan. You can’t Tarzan around any more. It’s a mass age, to let you in on a secret. You think those lice’re using one guy? Naw! They’re using an organized mob and we got to fight them with organization. Cee-rist, why’d you hitch up with Clair if not to work with an organization? Johnny’s told me your girl’s down at Clair’s. That’s what we need, all of us getting together to root out that nest of lice.” He leaned back in his chair. “Okay, I’ve blown my top. Besides you shouldn’t nose around Harlem alone.”

“Who put you up to say that? Suzy?”

“I’ve never met Suzy, whoever she is.”

“My girl. Johnny did then!”

“Try again.”

Sam circled his spoon around in his empty cup. “Pardon me for a minute. I better take a look at my mother.” He found her sitting at the window in the living room, her face mournful but dry-eyed. “You all right, mom?”

“Even in America the synagogues’re not safe.”